Interdisciplinary Approaches to Consumer Culture

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 12.01.04

  1. Unit Guide
  1. Objective: Do you teach the same population I do?
  2. My students
  3. Rationale
  4. Teaching Impoverished Children
  5. Describing your consumer choice may change you as a consumer.
  6. Marketing Tricks
  7. Books that influenced this unit.
  8. The Big Idea
  9. Technology tools and classroom meetings
  10. Classroom Activities
  11. Appendix A: Implementing District Standards
  12. Annotated Teacher Bibliography
  13. Endnotes

Do We Really Need What We Want?: Consumerism and Second Graders

Mary Grace Flowers

Published September 2012

Tools for this Unit:

Annotated Teacher Bibliography

Chin, Elizabeth, Purchasing Power, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

This book is an ethnography of the consumer lives of poor, working class minority children and their spending habits and consumer choices. Chin provides an up-close and unique perspective of how consumer savvy these children truly are.

Menzel, Peter, Material World: A Global Family Portrait, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1994

This pictorial study gives a twist to the ordinary ways in which we look at the possessions of others around the world. The pictures depict family portraits and include the items that would normally be displayed "inside" of their homes, Menzel includes them in the portraits, but displays them "outside" of their homes. A very powerful portrayal of both consumer and cultural similarities and differences.

Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Print.

This set of ethnographic portraits takes you into the homes of thirty different individuals and families and dissects the possessions and objects with which they surround themselves. Miller interprets the attachments that each person has to different objects. In one of his case studies is a gentleman by the name of George, Miller shows how empty his life is in every sense of the word based on the fact that he surrounds himself with nothing.

http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/webquests/index.html

This website gives a clear and concise definition of what a WebQuest is and the concepts that support its use.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6e46g_QcnY

This is a YouTube video of second graders explaining what a WebQuest is and how they use WebQuests within their classrooms. This is the same video that appears on my WebQuest created for this unit.

Wilson, Margaret Berry. "Home Responsive Classroom." Home Responsive Classroom. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Aug. 2012. http://www.responsiveclassroom.org/>.

This is the main website for this research-based behavior modification. The site explains the six components and the research that supports its implementation into both schools and districts.

Comments:

Cecil Johnson

September 1, 2020 at 12:47 pm

First Year Teaching Subject

I am a new teacher teaching Family and Consumer Science at the Middle School level. I am currently trying to take years of business experience and create an interesting teaching moment for my students. Consuerism is the topic that I think is improtant to get my students up and runnning for the semester.

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